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I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

— Antonio Gramsci

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Intelligence

More quotes by Antonio Gramsci

To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is a communist and revolutionary act.

History is at once freedom and necessity.

Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971)

History teaches, but it has no pupils.

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

All men are intellectuals: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.

Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971)

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Each of these private teachers who work for pay ... inculcates nothing else than these opinions of the multitude which they opine when they are assembled and calls this knowledge wisdom.

Socrates

Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.

Wilhelm Reich Philosophy : An Introduction to the Art of Wondering (2005)

Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël De l’Allemagne [Germany (1813)

Like every 'intellectual', a philosophy teacher is a petty bourgeois. When he opens his mouth, it is petty-bourgeois ideology that speaks: its resources and ruses are infinite.

Louis Althusser Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1968)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Antonio Gramsci (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.